Hair transplantation procedures are well-known, and typically involve harvesting donor hair grafts from the “donor areas,” for example, side and back fringe areas of the patient's scalp, or other body surfaces, and implanting them in a bald area (“recipient area”). Various techniques were developed over the years for harvesting donor hair grafts. One such technique involves excising a strip of skin from the back area of the scalp and then dissecting the strip under a microscope to isolate individual hair follicular units for later implantation into the recipient area. This technique suffers numerous disadvantages, including being very time consuming, tedious, expensive, and requiring suturing and resulting scarring. Recently some physicians employ a technique called Follicular Unit Extraction (“FUE”) that allows harvest of individual follicular units without a need to cut a strip of tissue from the patient's scalp.
An FUE method for harvesting follicular units allows for individual follicular units to be harvested directly from the donor area by utilizing a hollow punch having a cutting edge and an interior lumen with a diameter of, for example, 1 mm. The punch is used to make a small circular incision in the skin around the follicular unit. Thereafter, the follicular unit is removed, e.g., using forceps, for subsequent implantation into a recipient site with a specially devised insertion needle. FUE procedure avoids scarring associated with cutting a strip of scalp, reduces patient's discomfort, and reduces recovery time, however, it is a laborious procedure, take a long time to perform and it requires a high degree of technical skill.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,572,625 (the “Rassman patent”) describes a particular mechanism for an alignment of hair follicles with the hollow harvesting punch during the FUE procedure. The harvesting procedure described in the Rassman patent teaches the users to align an axis of the harvesting instrument along the axis of the follicular unit to be extracted.